Parable of the Talents (11 page)

There's less cholera, for instance, and less hepatitis. There are fewer of all the diseases that result from bad san-itation, spoiled food, or malnutrition. People boil the water they drink in cities where there's a problem and in squatter settlements with their open sewers—ditches. There are more gardens, and old-fashioned skills in food preservation are being revived.

People barter for goods and services where cash is rare. They use hand tools and draft animals where there is no money for fuel or no power equipment left. Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.

There are plenty of wars going on around the world now.

Kenya and Tanzania are fighting. I haven't yet heard why.

Bolivia and Peru are having another border dispute. Pakistan and Afghanistan have joined forces in a religious war against India. One part of Spain is fighting against another. Greece and Turkey are on the edge of war, and Egypt and Libya are slaughtering one another. China, like Spain, is tearing at itself.

War is very popular these days.

I suppose we should be grateful that there hasn't been an-other "nuclear exchange." The one three years ago between Iran and Iraq scared the hell out of everyone. After it happened, there must have been peace all over the world for maybe three months. People who had hated one another for generations found ways to talk peace. But insult by insult, expediency by expediency, cease-fire violation by cease-fire violation, most
of the peace talks broke down. It's always been much easier to make war than to make peace.

Back in this country, in Dallas, Texas, some fool of a rich boy went adventuring among the free poor of a big squatter settlement. He wound up wearing the latest in electronic convict control devices—also known as slave collars, dog collars, and choke chains. And with the collar to encourage him, he learned to make himself useful to a local pimp. I've heard that the new collars are damned sophisticated. The old ones—worn more often as belts—could only cause pain.

They delivered shocks and sometimes damaged or killed people. The new collars don't kill, and they can be worn for months or years at a time and used often to deliver punish-ment. They're programmed to resist being removed or de-stroyed by delivering jolts of pain severe enough to cause unconsciousness. I've heard that some collars can also give cheap, delicious rewards of pleasure for good behavior by encouraging changes in brain chemistry—stimulating the wearer to produce endorphins. I don't know whether that's true, but if it is, the whole business sounds a little like being a sharer—except that instead of sharing what other people feel, the wearer feels whatever the person holding the con-trol unit wants him to feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person's whole life. I've heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can't stand the pain, but because they can't stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending.

The Texas boy's father spent a lot of money. He hired pri-vate cops—the kind who'll do anything if you pay them enough—and they sliced through the squatter camp as though it were a ripe melon until they found the boy. And with that, bingo! Slavery was discovered in Texas in 2032. Innocent people—not criminals or indigents—were being held against their wills and used for immoral purposes! How about that!

What I'd like to see is a state of the union where slavery isn't being practiced.

Here's another news item. On the planet Mars, living, multicellular organisms have been discovered . . . sort of.

They're very small and very strange inside, although outside they look like tiny slugs . . . some of the time. They live at least four meters down in certain polar rock formations, and they're not exactly animals. They're a little like Terrestrial slime molds. And, like slime molds, they go through inde-pendent single-celled stages during which they eat their way through the rocks, multiplying by dividing, resembling little antifreeze-filled amoeba. When they've exhausted the food supply in their immediate neighborhoods, they unite into sluglike multicellular masses to travel to new sites where the minerals they ingest are available. They don't reproduce in their slug form as Terrestrial slime molds do. They seem to need the slug form only to produce enough of their corrosive antifreeze solution to enable them to migrate through rock to a fresh supply of food. They make soil in two ways. They eat minerals, pass these through their bodies, and shed a dust so fine and so slippery that, like graphite, it can work as a kind of lubricant. And they ooze through the rocks in men-slug form, their corrosive slime dissolving trails, cracks, and making more dust.

These creatures are living Martians!
So far, though, all the specimens captured and examined at Leal Station died soon after being taken from their cold, rocky home. For that reason and others, they are both a great discovery and a They are the last discoveries that will be made by scientists working for the U.S. Government.

President Donner has sold the last of our Mars installations to a Euro-Japanese company, in fulfillment of one of his earliest campaign promises. The idea is that all nonmilitary space travel, manned and unmanned, should be priva-tized. "If it's worth doing at all," Donner said, "it should be done for profit, and not as a burden on the taxpayers." As though profit could be counted only as immediate financial gain. I was born in 2009, and for as long as I can remember, I've heard people complaining about the space program as a waste of money, and even as one of the reasons for the coun-try's deterioration.

Ridiculous! There is so much to be learned from space it-self and from the nearby worlds! And now we've found liv-ing extraterrestrials, and we're going to quit. I suppose that if the Martian "slime molds" can be used for something—mining, perhaps, or chemistry—then they'll be protected, cultivated, bred to be even more useful. But if they prove to be of no particular use, they'll be left to survive or not as best they can with whatever impediments the company sees fit to put in their paths. If they're unlucky enough to be bad for business in some way—say they develop a taste for some of the company's building materials—they'll be lucky to survive at all. I doubt that Terrestrial environmental laws will protect them. Those laws don't even really protect plant and animal species here on Earth. And who would enforce such laws on Mars?

And yet, somehow, I'm glad our installations have been sold and not just abandoned. Selling them was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Most people wouldn't have minded see-ing them abandoned. They say we have no business wasting time or money in space when there are so many people suf-fering here on Earth, here in America. I wonder, though, where the money received in exchange for the installations has gone. I haven't noticed any new government education or jobs programs. There's been no government help for the homeless, the sick, the hungry. Squatter settlements are as big and as nasty as ever. As a country, we've given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We've given it up for nothing—although I'm sure some people some-where are richer now.

Consider, though: a brand-new form of life has been dis-covered on Mars, and it got less time on the news disk than the runaway Texas boy. We're becoming more and more iso-lated as a people. We're sliding into undirected negative change, and what's worse, we're getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.

More news. Scientists in Australia have managed to bring a human infant to term in an artificial womb. The child was conceived in a petri dish. Nine months later, it was taken, alive and healthy, from the last in a series of complex, computer-controlled containers. The child is the normal son of parents who could not have conceived or borne a child without a great deal of medical help.

Reporters are already calling the womb containers "eggs,"

and there's some foolish popular argument over whether a

"hatched" person is as human as a "normally born" person.

There are ministers and priests arguing that this tampering with human reproduction is wrong, of course. I doubt that they'll have much to worry about for a while. The whole process is still experimental and would be avail-able only to the very rich if it were being marketed to any-one—which it isn't, yet I wonder whether it will catch on at all in this world where so many poor women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers, carrying to term the child of wealthier people even when the wealthy people are able to have a child in the normal way. If you're rich, you can have a surrogate for not much more than the price of feeding and housing her for nine months. If she's smart and you're generous, you might also wind up agreeing to feed, house, and help educate her children.

And you might give her husband a job. Channa Ryan's mother did this kind of work. Accord-ing to Channa, her mother bore 13 surrogate children, none of them genetically related to her. Her marriage didn't sur-vive, but her two genetic daughters were given a chance to learn to read and write, cook, garden, and sew. That isn't enough to know in this world, of course, but it's more than most poor people learn.

It will be a long while—years, decades perhaps—before human surrogates are replaced by computerized eggs.

Con-sider, though: eggs combined with cloning technology (an-other toy of the rich) would give men the ability to have a child without the genetic or the gestational help of a woman.

Such men would still need a woman's ovum, stripped of its genetic contents, but that would be all. If the idea caught on, they might be willing to use the ovum of some animal species.

And, of course, women will be free to do without men completely, since women can provide their own ova. I won-der what this will mean for humanity in the future.

Radical change or just one more option among the many?

I can see artificial wombs being useful when we travel into extrasolar space—useful for gestating our first animals once they're transported as frozen embryos and useful for gestating children if the nonreproductive work of women settlers is needed to keep the colony going. In that way, per-haps the eggs may be good for us—for Earthseed—in the long run.

But what they'll do to human societies in the meantime, I wonder.

I've saved the worst news item for last The election was on Tuesday, November 2. Jarret won. When Bankole heard the news, he said, "May God have mercy on our souls." I find that I'm more worried about our bodies. Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as "witches," and torch the churches and homes of people they don't like.

We all voted—all of us who were old enoughs—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used mat analogy more than once.

Here are some of the things that Jarret said back when he was shouting from his own Church of Christian America pulpit. I have copies of several of his sermons on disk.

"There was a time, Christian Americans, when our coun-try ruled the world," he said. "America was God's country and we were God's people and God took care of his own. Now look at us. Who are we? What are we? What foul, seething, corrupt heathen concoction have we become?

"Are we Christian? Are we? Can our country be just a lit-tle bit Christian and a little bit Buddhist, maybe? How about a little bit Christian and a Little bit Hindu? Or maybe a coun-try can be a little bit Christian and a little bit Jewish?

How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Moslem? Or per-haps we can be a little bit Christian and a little bit pagan cultist?"

And then he thundered, "We are God's people, or we are film! We are God's people, or we are nothing! We are God's people! God's people!

"Oh my God, my God, why have we forsaken thee?

"Why have we allowed ourselves to be seduced and be-trayed by these allies of Satan, these heathen purveyors of fake and unchristian doctrines? These people. . . these pagans are not only wrong. They're dangerous. They're as destructive as bullets, as contagious as plagues, as poisonous as snakes to the society they infest. They kill us, Christian American brothers and sisters. They kill us! They rouse the righteous anger of God against us for our misguided gen-erosity to them. They are the natural destroyers of our coun-try. They are lovers of Satan, seducers of our children, rapists of our women, drug sellers, usurers, thieves, and murderers!

"And in the face of all that, what are we to them? Shall we live with them? Shall we let them continue to drag our country down into hell? Think! What do we do to weeds, to viruses, to parasitic worms, to cancers? What must we do to protect ourselves and our children? What can we do to re-gain our stolen nation?"

Nasty. Very nasty. Jarret was the junior senator from Texas when he preached the sermon that contained those lines. He never answered the questions he asked. He left mat to his listeners. And yet he says he's against the witch burn-ings.

His speeches during the campaign have been somewhat less inflammatory than his sermons. He's had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this non-sense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to con-quer and to rule?

Well, now he's conquered. In January of next year, he'll be sworn in, and he'll rule. Then, I suppose we'll see just how much of his own propaganda he believes.

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Another, happier, more local event happened here at Acorn yesterday. Lucio Figueroa, Zahra Balter, and Jeff King came in with a huge load of books for our library. Some look al-most new. Others are old and worn, but they've all been pro-tected from the weather, from water, and from fire. There are textbooks, up to graduate level in several subjects, specialized dictionaries, a set of encyclopedias—2001